Paving of a roadway with asphalt material is generally carried out by a paving machine that is supplied with asphalt material by a number of supply trucks and/or a material transfer vehicle. The paving machine is self-propelled and driven by a wheeled or tracked drive system. In a common type of paving machine, an asphalt receiving hopper is located at the front end of the machine to receive asphalt material from a truck or material transfer vehicle, and a hopper conveyor typically comprised of one or more slat conveyors located below the asphalt receiving hopper transfers the asphalt material from the hopper to a transverse distributing auger that is mounted near the rear of the machine. The asphalt material is deposited onto and across the roadway or other surface to be paved by the distributing auger. A floating screed located at the rear end of the machine behind the distributing auger compacts the asphalt material and forms the asphalt mat.
Asphalt material is comprised of an asphaltic binder and aggregates of various sizes, including both coarse and fine aggregate materials. Because the equipment needed to produce asphalt material is expensive and the space required extensive, asphalt material is typically produced in a production facility that is dedicated to such purpose. Consequently, it is frequently necessary to transport the asphalt material from its place of origin to a paving machine at a remote paving site. The asphalt material is transported in dump trucks to a paving machine or to a material transfer vehicle that completes the transfer to the paving machine. Frequently, asphalt material is discharged directly from the transport dump trucks into the asphalt receiving hopper of the asphalt paving machine. Because the front wall of a typical paving machine receiving hopper is low enough to allow a dump truck to dump directly into the hopper, and because the hopper of the paving machine is generally much wider than the dump body of the truck, asphalt material dumped into the hopper by a dump truck will frequently flow around the outside of the dump body and spill over the low front wall of the hopper onto the roadway. Furthermore, some of the asphalt material that flows around the outside of the dump body will accumulate in the front corners of the paving machine hopper, and this material may not be carried by the conveyor system of the paving machine out of the hopper. Asphalt material may also spill over the front wall of the hopper, and it may also accumulate in the front corners of the paving machine hopper when the hopper is loaded by a material transfer vehicle. Such material must be shoveled by hand into the hopper for transport by the hopper conveyor to the distributing auger. This material may be as hot as 300° F. (149° C.), and it can be dangerous to move it by hand shoveling. It would be desirable therefore if a hopper modification could be provided that would more readily retain asphalt material in the asphalt receiving hopper as it is discharged into the hopper in such a manner that essentially all of it is likely to be carried by the conveyor system out of the hopper to the distributing auger.